Check out the short film above, by Mexico based filmaker and activist Greg Berger, aka Gringoyo, who’s been travelling around Latin America for over 10 years making insightful and funny films about the exploitation of the continent by capitalism and US imperial interests. He’s now asking viewers to contribute directly, so he can make 100% viewer funded films challenging the lies of the corporate media.
As the film explains, in 2006 Mexican President Felipe Calderon decided that, faced with massive power of the drugs cartels who control the flows of cocaine and other drugs into the US, he would use the military to take them down. The reason they are so powerful is that keeping drugs illegal in Mexico and the US means that those who traffick them stand to make immense profits from a completely unregulated market. They can then use this vast wealth to corrupt police forces, politicians and anyone that threatens their ongoing bonanza. Recently in Ciudad Juarez, the local paper appealed to drug lords as the “de facto rulers of the city” to explain what they should and should not published, after several of their journalists were murdered. Drug cartels love prohibition.
But Calderon’s solution wasn’t to start thinking about a rational, sane drugs policy, which recognises that humans have always
Felipe Calderon and Obama: united in wanting maximum profits for US arms manufacturers
and will always take drugs, and that this should be something that is legally regulated instead of left in the hands of gangsters. Oh no, he had a much better idea: send in the army, and go to war with cartels that are so heavily armed that fighting them amounts to a civil war. Since then, violence has spread throughout the country to many previously peaceful regions, and by the government’s own estiamtes 28,000 people have been killed, many of them after being horrifically tortured.
Last week US secretary of state made clear the position of the Obama administration on the whole mess, when she called for an equivalent of Plan Colombia for Mexico. In 1999, faced with a CIA assessment that the left wing FARC rebels were capable of taking power within 5 years, the US decided to pour money into the Colombian armed forces, making it the second biggest recipient of US military aid after Israel. The results were predictable, with intensified conflict and many more civilian deaths. But I suppose pouring petrol on the fire makes sense when you’re selling the petrol: US arms manufactures are growing fat on the profits of drug wars in Colombia and Mexico.
Sensationalist media coverage has helped bolster support for these policies in the US. To be fair, a lot of the cartels sound like they have been made up by the guy that wrote The Expendables on crack. For example, there’s La Familia, the Christian fundamentalist methamphetamine manufacturers, who in June ambushed a federal police convoy in Mexico killing 12. Their leader, Nazario Moreno — aka El Mas Loco, or The Craziest One — has written his own bible, and holds prayer meetings before going out on attacks. Their also funding political candidates to try and take over the government of their home state of Michoacan.
As you can see, Los Zetas are not short of guns
Then there’s the real action movie characters, Los Zetas. They started out as a an elite Mexican military special forces unit, trained by the School of the Americas and Israeli commandos. But then they realised there was more money to be made running the drugs trade than fighting it, defected and set themselves up as a well armed, highly trained paramilitary drugs cartel.
Hearing about some of the grisly antics of these mad bastards, you’re mind maybe does jump to the solutions you’ve been trained to think of by the entertainment industry -- crush them with loads of guns. But what the story of Los Zetas shows is that will never work. There is literally no level of government that can’t be corrupted by the huge profits resulting from an unregulated drug market. And those same huge profits mean that no matter how much money the Mexican and US governments spend on fighting them, they’ll always be able to employ, train and equip soldiers.
Ironically, when Clinton advocated Plan Colombia for Mexico, it was in response to a question asking about what the US government was going to do about “the flow of drugs coming north and guns going south” (cartels arm themselves mainly in the US due to its insanely lax gun laws). It’s time countries like the US and UK woke up and realised that our prohibitionist policies don’t only cause huge harm to communities here: they also fuel brutal wars in countries like Mexico, Colombia and Afghanistan, and the only people happy about it are drug lords and western arms manufacturers.
Bonus: The single best news source on the Latin American drug wars is Narco News. Check it out all the time!
Yet another leading medical expert has come out to call for the decriminalisation of personal drug use.
Sir Ian Gilmore is the outgoing head of the Royal College of Physicians, a professional body which represents 20,000 medical professionals in the UK. He has a long standing interest in drugs policy stemming from his background as a liver specialist. In an email to all members, he wrote:
“I personally back the chairman of the UK Bar Council, Nicholas Green QC, when he calls for drug laws to be reconsidered with a view to decriminalising illicit drugs use. This could drastically reduce crime and improve health.”
The report he refers to was produced for lawyers, and also argues for an end to prohibition, estimating its cost to the economy at £13 billion a year. Sir Ian also endorsed an article published in the British Medical Journal by Steve Rolles of Transform Drugs Policy which called for a regulated drugs market.
He said:
“Everyone who has looked at this in a serious and sustained way concludes that the present policy of prohibition is not a success. There are really strong arguments to look again. Every day in our hospital wards we see drug addicts with infections from dirty needles, we see heroin addicts with complications from contaminated drugs.”
He went on to argue that this was a result not of heroin itself, but of the prohibition policy which forces addicts on to a black market of dirty heroin.
What this news tells us is that, despite the crazy propaganda from the likes of the Daily Mail and The Sun, SSY’s position on drugs is a mainstream view shared by health professionals, scientists and anyone who has made any kind of serious inquiry into drugs policy. Prohibition has done untold harm, and caused far more people to use dangerous drugs and suffer serious health problems or die than otherwise would have done. Health professionals can see that.
Perhaps it’s time for a major broad campaign that brings together all those who want to see an end to prohibition, and is capable of demonstrating just how much support there is for the idea amongst those who know what they’re talking about.
Monday morning's headlines after SSY's legalise cannabis march
Every human society since we first evolved has experimented with drugs, pyschoactive substances, and altered states of consciousness.
Many leading psychologists and anthropologists believe that this is a normal part of human life, and experimenting with substances like cannabis or magic mushrooms has actually played a role in the evolution of modern, intelligent humans.
But in the last 200 years human society has changed dramatically. With the arrival of capitalism came the rise of modern states, with their borders, armies and police forces. As the technology to control their own people developed, states have had an ever increasing urge to monitor and discipline their populations.
One of the ways they have done this is implement a worldwide system of prohibition of drugs. While the two biggest drug killers, alcohol and tobacco, remain legal billion pound industries, relatively harmless drugs like cannabis and ecstasy remain the target of expensive police operations, and users are turned into criminals who can face imprisonment for doing nothing but experimenting with their own bodies.
The drugs laws we have in Britain and throughout the developed world have never borne any relation to real medical or scientific information, but instead have been shaped by the prejudices and scapegoats created by elites to divide and control the people. One of the main ways they have done this is to use racism, associating certain substances with foreigners or ethnic minorities.
Now, in the 21st century, many countries around the world are finally beginning to wake up to the fact that prohibition has been a costly disaster that has caused untold misery across the planet. The time has at last come to begin treating drugs as a health and social issue, not a criminal one, and base our drugs policies on real scientific evidence, not prejudice and racism.
If you want to free the weed clap your hands.. CLAP CLAP.
Yesterday saw the SSY organised Legalise Cannabis – End the War on Drugs demo take to the streets of the west end of Glasgow, with between 300-350 mostly young people turning out for the biggest march of its kind Scotland has seen for a number of years.
The demo left University Avenue in the west end of the city at around 1pm with a small police escort, before marching via Byres Road and Dumbarton Road to Kelvingrove Park. Indeed, the marchers then proceeded to er, legalise cannabis, with the police adopting a very welcome non-interference approach to anyone lighting up in the park!
Across the world, the tide is beginning to turn against blanket drugs prohibition. An ever increasing number of countries are opting to decriminalise possession and start treating drugs as a social and health issue, rather than a criminal one, with harm reduction at the fore. This couldn’t be further from the truth in the UK, however. None of the big four parties are willing to go anywhere near a policy of relaxing our backwards drugs laws – displayed all too recently in the rush to ban mephedrone, or m-cat, flying against the advice of top scientists and even the government’s own drugs advisory board, several of whom resigned in protest, but happily going along with the agenda of right-wing tabloids.
This is why we felt it especially important to take the message to the streets again this summer that there is a real alternative to the madness of drugs prohibition – to legalise, regulate and control drug use, rather than pushing the whole industry underground and into the arms global crime syndicates.
Saturday’s demo got a great reception from passers-by – afternoon shoppers on Byres Road applauded the march as it passed, while groups of young people charged over the street to join it as it went by. The fact is, most people know that cannabis is not a dangerous drug, and if the reception SSY have got on the streets over the past few weeks is anything to by, most people know it should legalised too.
For as long as the UK government continues on their ridiculous and, ultimately, flawed approach of criminalising young people who smoke the occasional joint, forcing heroin addicts into a life of crime and prostitution, and wasting vast amounts of police time and resources on a pointless “war on drugs” that fuels conflict across the world, SSY will continue to campaign for sweeping reform to the drugs laws. See youse all next year.
M-CAT NOT FAT CATS! The march sets off from Uni Avenue
When I say LEGALISE, you say.. CANNABIS!
The PA system that totally worked the whole time and that there was absolutely no problems with. Uhuh
Carmen Marie Moulton from Penrith died in April just after the government imposed a ban on mephedrone, due to media scare stories with no scientific basis. These stories, as we all now know, revolved around picking up on the death of virtually any young person around the country and pinning the blame on mephedrone. Many of these false stories have now been exposed as bollocks, but long after the fact.
Papers said police were probing whether Carmen had taken the “deadly party drug”, but yet again toxicology reports have pronounced her’s a non-mephedrone related death. While there’s little news as of yet as to what did cause her tragic death, expect to see more and more of these so-called M-Cat casualties turning out to actually have died of other drugs or natural causes.
As the Daily Mail picks up another story of mephedrone madness – this time the death of a daughter of a premiership footballer. Her tragic death is being used opportunistically by the tabloids to support their unscientific banning of mephedrone. In reality Sibylle Siberski tragically committed suicide, and the drugs she took are being used as a stick to attack them with. The fact that she killed herself after breaking up with a five month long relationship with her boyfriend is ignored – as is the fact she was taking another harmful drug, which acts as a depressant – champagne.
This dangerous champagne drug is associated with some of the worst criminals in the world – Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, George Bush, Tony Blair, Maggie Thatcher and Tim Westwood are all known to have taken champagne at various times in their life. The effects of this drug have been disastrous – many former Eton pupils are known to have taken champagne regularly throughout their schooldays and then moved on to erratic and destructive behaviour resulting in millions of British people being made unemployed, in the coal and steel industries.
Alan Duncan gets high before launcing a vicious attack on the poor.
Champagne also inspired hostile, aggressive and unreasonable behaviour towards the people of Scotland, as many regular champagne users in the Tory cabinet continually denied the right for Scotland to have it’s own Parliament. This violent behaviour reached it’s worst when the Tories champagne induced madness led them to inflict the poll tax in Scotland. Regular champagne junkie Maggie Thatcher was so poisoned by the drug that she had to be dragged kicking and screaming from power by her own party members, desperate to put the clean living moderate John Major in her place.
SSY thinks if the tabloids are going to blame mephedrone baselessly for the tragic suicide of a young girl then we should take action against champagne, whose drug fuelled madness has allowed Tories to cause massive harm to some of the poorest communities in the UK.
“OH GOD OH GOD STOP I CAN SEE SATAN HE’S LOOKING RIGHT AT ME!” -- this is not a common response to listening to most music, with the exception of Green Day or Daniel O’Donnell. However the world’s finest newspaper has found another TERRIFYING threat to your children -- noiseodrugs. Just when you thought your weans were safe from mephedrone -- or “meow meow” as no-one under 40 calls it -- sick bastards have concocted a new method to terrify your kids, and this time all they need is a pair of headphones and (surprise surprise) the internet to overdose.
The “drug” is called idoser and works by playing a series of binaural beats which affect certain parts of the brain to simulate being high. Some users claim to experience a high similar to being on cannabis or ecstasy, depending on what they listen to. Other tunes -- called “Idoses” -- are designed to be more extreme, almost like a bad trip and are called scary names like “Gates of Hades”. One user allegedly clawed his own eyes out with his fingers so he could jam a pencil into his brains whilst listening to “Gates of Hades” -- it later was revealed he was in fact listening to S-Club 7 “Ain’t no party like an S-Club Party”, which is still legal and unregulated.
It remains to be seen if the Government will try and ban idoses. Right now it seems very unlikely -- no one has died or been seriously harmed from idoses, and the nature of the internet makes it almost impossible to ban someone from listening to a piece of music. There’s also understandable disbelief about someone being able to get high off of listening to something (though amazingly binaural beats can affect brain waves).
Listening to this man is 23% more dangerous than crack.
I wouldn’t underestimate the power of media hysteria combined with Government opportunism though -- the fact people won’t understand how you can get high off of sounds may disturb and scare them more than getting high off of something you can understand like pills or grass. And under the ridiculous and draconian Criminal Justice Act “repetitive beats” which may be associated with drug use are technically illegal -- someone tell the Orange Order ASAP. Thankfully the tuneful symphony of most Irish rebel songs keeps them clearly on the side of British law.
With mephedrone banned after a wave of hysteria and media exaggeration in the face of scientific evidence, it’s not impossible idoses could be banned if newspapers decide to run with it. All it would take is a couple of savvy editors picking up stories of folk dying within a couple of hours/same evening as listening to an idose to start a frenzy, regardless of how they actually died - the same way they did with mephedrone. The reality is stuff like idoses -- like all things humans do to get high -- has been around for hundreds of years, it’s just been called something different. Instead of listening through headphones to get high tribes used to listen to repetitive drumming beats. Fortunately it took British imperialism a few hundred years before they banned that kind of thing in the Criminal Justice Act.
SSY has already risked life and limb to bring you a few examples of terrifying idoses which we have outlined below. Listen at your own peril,
Behavioural psychology tells us that in the morning you’ll be 17.8% safer after listening to this Idose
Call the polis, I can hear repetitive beats
OH GOD IT’S CALLED GATES OF HADES BAN THIS SICK FILTH NOW
It’s the start of the summer holidays, and in Scotland, that can mean only one thing: rain, and lots of it.
Okay, two things actually, and as the holidays arrive in a (literal) hailstorm of erm, rain and rain, SSY is pleased to make an announcement which will more than make up for any dreich weather the past couple of days: it’s the return of our annual Legalise Cannabis march!
The next two months are shaping up to be a bumper summer for SSY, with the long-awaited return of Camp Secret Squirrel at the beginning of August, and various other shenanigans before then, including our World Cup party, tomorrow’s conference, as well as all the usual stuff. Well you can now add more event to your diary… pencil in Saturday 24 July for the annual Legalise Cannabis demo!
This year, it’s been decided to take a more broad approach to the demo, given the full-blown, hysterical media-driven moral panic we saw earlier in the year over ‘psycho-killer-drug’ mephedrone and it’s subsequent kneejerk banning. What this proved once and for all is that when it comes to drug policy in the UK, the agenda isn’t being driven by scientific evidence or experts on the matter, but by right-wing tabloid newspapers acting on self-appointed moral crusades.
It’s easy in the current climate to view the ‘war on drugs’ as something that’s unworthy of attention. But what needs to be realised is that the disastrous consequences of the ‘War on Drugs’ are implicated in numerous deep-seated problems within our society, from crime to prostitution to poverty, and are central to conflicts being played out across the globe, from Mexico to Afghanistan. It’s an issue that isn’t going to disappear; only last week it was revealed that Scotland has among the highest proportion of heroin and cocaine users on the planet.
Legalise Cannabis marches take place in hundreds of towns and cities across the world every year, and SSY is proud to organise one of very few such events which take place in the UK. The movement in favour of legalisation is one with a growing sense of momentum, particularly with ongoing developments in the US. Earlier this year, huge rallies in favour of marijuana legalisation took place across North America, in part due to the Proposition 19 referendum which is taking place in California this November. If passed, this would decriminalise cannabis possession for those aged over 21, and control and tax its production and sale. This could be a pivotal moment in the movement to legalise cannabis globally, and the outcome will be watched with interest across the world. The sudden move towards this has in no small part been prompted by the deep financial crisis that the state California has found itself in – the idea now being that it can recoup at least some of this debt from taxing marijuana!
So listen up Cameron, Clegg and Osborne – if you’re all so desperate to cut down on the deficit, how about following the example of California?
LEGALISE CANNABIS – END THE WAR ON DRUGS NOW!
March assembles 12.30pm, University Avenue (at Glasgow Uni main gate), Glasgow
followed by music, DJs, speakers & more at Kelvingrove Park
15,000 attend a Legalise Cannabis demo in Colorado, April 2010
On the left Louis Wainwright and on the right Nicolas Smith
The case for the mephedrone ban rushed in by the last government was again undermined today, after it was revealed two teenagers from Scunthorpe did NOT die as a result of the drug.
Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19, died in March. At the time Humberside Police helped contribute to the climate of drugs panic by holding a press conference that claimed that they had information that “the deaths were linked to M-Cat” and that anyone that had taken the drug should “attend a hospital as a matter of urgency.”
This was then taken up by tabloids like The Sun as part of a hysterical campaign which successfully got mephedrone banned. As we argued at the time, this was based on straight up misinformation, which claimed that the drug had been responsible for scores of deaths.
In fact, Professor Roumen Sedefov, a leading scientist who monitors new drugs for the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), said this week he was aware of only one fatality in the world – that of a woman in Sweden – where the drug had been definitively identified as the cause of death.
In the case of the two guys from Scunthorpe, toxicology reports have revealed there were no traces of Mephedrone in their blood. Tests are ongoing to see if there were any other drugs present.
Professor David Nutt, the scientific adviser that Labour sacked for giving honest scientific opinions, has now called for an inquiry into the role of Humberside Police in stoking panic.
“The temperature was rising a bit, but the deaths got it boiling over,” he said. “You can argue if that hadn’t happened the previous government wouldn’t have been bounced into this response. If these reports are true, the government’s rush to ban mephedrone never had any serious scientific credibility – it looks much more like a decision based on a short-term electoral calculation.”
He added: “This news demonstrates why it’s so important to base drug classification on the evidence, not fear and why the police, media and politicians, should only make public pronouncements once the facts are clear.”
This news once again vindicates the stance taken by SSY as the only political group that stood by the scientific evidence and campaigned against the banning of Mephedrone. We didn’t do that because we think it’s a good thing or that people should take it, but because we’re against politics being hijacked by a bizarre media crusade that aimed at selling papers through fear and lies. After months of this thousands of young people who would never have heard of the drug otherwise are now interested in it – just in time for the government to put the trade exclusively in the hands of illegal drug dealers. Good job, corporate media/mainstream politicians.
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